Franciscans

Franciscans, men and women affiliated with a far-reaching tradition within the Roman Catholic Church, who embrace a life that may involve a state of consecration, or the taking of vows, and that follows one of several interpretations of the thirteenth-century rule set down by Saint Francis of Assisi. The largest single branch of the Franciscans, the Order of Friars Minor (OFM), shares company with other members of the Franciscan family, such as the Capuchin Friars, the Conventual friars, numerous branches of religious sisters, the Third Order of Saint Francis, and an assortment of lay associations. The term "Franciscan," especially in the history of Latin America, is most popularly employed in reference to the Friars Minor, the primary focus of the present article.

Saint Francis received approval of a rule in 1209 from Pope Innocent III, officially founding the Friars Minor as an order of mendicants; its members voluntarily relinquish all rights to the ownership of property and live solely from alms. The Franciscan habit, a brown tunic with a hood and a rope belt ending in three knots to signify the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, is universally recognized. Franciscan men and women have been at work in Latin America since the beginning of European contact; their legacy of evangelization is pervasive, and the Franciscan presence in Latin America remains strong. From the second voyage of Columbus on, Franciscans made their way to the Americas in the rush to spread the Christian message. They founded their first missions in the Antilles, from which expeditions to the mainland were undertaken.

In Mexico, a group of reformist, millenarian Franciscans dominated the first generation of missionaries, seeing the newly found territories as inviting the dawn of a radical new social order, the kingdom of God on earth. The responsibility for building this new order, they believed, sat squarely on their shoulders, and the extreme zeal with which they undertook its realization has been alternately lauded and criticized.

In 1522 Emperor Charles V responded to requests from Hernán Cortés to send Franciscans to Mexico to undertake the systematic conversion of the natives. Thus began a steady stream of missionaries from Spain and other countries, the most notable among the first arrivals being Fray Pedro de Gante, a Belgian who worked tirelessly among the poor and who established schools, chapels, and health facilities for the Indians. He was joined in 1524 by a group of friars known as "The Twelve," a name that symbolically connected the missionaries to the twelve Apostles. These friars firmly implanted Franciscanism, with its emphasis on poverty, communal living, and the passion of Christ, as the primary Christian force among the newly converted in Mexico. They battled, at times fiercely, with civil and church authorities over control of native populations. The first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, himself a Franciscan friar, defended with a great sense of urgency the idea that the friars had primacy in all matters. By learning the native language and by instilling confidence in the church as the organizing principle of society, the friars met with success in their catechetical efforts. Accounts of mass baptisms found their way into early Franciscan accounts; the friars often recalled their exhaustion at administering the sacraments in towns near and far. By the mid-sixteenth century, the friars were organized into administrative units, or provinces, extending south from the central valley of Mexico to the Yucatán and Central America, north to Guadalajara, and eventually into the south and west of what is now the United States. Missionary colleges to train friars for work in the farthest reaches of New Spain were established in the seventeenth century in Querétaro, Mexico City, and Zacatecas. Friars were trained to teach not only Catholic doctrine but also those arts, crafts, and agricultural techniques considered beneficial to Christian living.

Policies of the ruling Bourbon dynasty in the mid- to late-eighteenth century, aimed at centralizing the church under tighter royal regulation, had profound effects on the friars. The crown secularized, or turned over to clergy not affiliated with a religious order, most properties and parishes that had come under the friars' corporate control over the course of two and a half centuries. Though the friars maintained certain principal monasteries, the decree of secularization forced them to abandon much of their pastoral work. By the period of independence in the 1820s, their numbers had declined sharply.

Franciscan involvement in South America parallels that in New Spain, with missionaries taking part in the evangelization program from the early colonial period. Friars arrived in Peru in 1532, embarking on a program of conversion and beginning the construction of churches, hospitals, and schools throughout the region, including present-day Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Chile north of the Bío-Bío River. Their first foundation in Ecuador, in Quito, dates to 1534. The symbolism of sending twelve friars into a new region was repeated in 1542, lending the name "Twelve Apostles" to one Peruvian province. As at New Spain, missionary colleges served to train friars for the more remote areas; only the Jesuits had as extensive a network of missions in South America, and once the Jesuits were expelled (Brazil, 1760; Spanish America, 1767), the friars took over these South American missions as well as the ones in New Spain. The annals of the Franciscans show that their missionary activities in South America met with varying degrees of success. The Friars Minor were much less active in what is now Colombia and Venezuela; those areas were dominated by their fellow Franciscans of the Capuchin branch.

Instability wrought by the Wars of Independence in the 1820s, combined with the already weakened state of the order resulting from eighteenth-century royal decrees aimed at curbing their power, made the Franciscans particularly vulnerable to attack from emerging social and political forces unfriendly to the clergy. The story of each individual country differs in the nineteenth century, but it is safe to conclude that the friars suffered persecutions of some type in nearly every locale. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the number of friars in Latin America declined, beginning with the flight of the Spanish Franciscans back to Europe after independence. The resuscitation of the order in the twentieth century likewise differs from one region to another. The most often cited catalyst for this rejuvenation, in any event, is the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII, which brought to the fore the need for social action of a type reminiscent of the Franciscan spirit.

See alsoCapuchin Friars; Gante, Pedro de; Sahagún, Bernardino de; Zumárraga, Juan de.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (1956).

León Lopetegui and Félix Zubillaga, Historia de la Iglesia en la América Española (1965).

Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson (1966); New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967).

Francisco Morales, ed., Franciscan Presence in the Americas (1984); The Americas: A Quarterly Journal of Inter-American Cultural History (published by the Academy of American Franciscan History).

Additional Bibliography

Abad Pérez, Antolín. Los Franciscanos en América. Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992.

Jackson, Robert H., and Edward D. Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Molina, Alonso de, Barry D. Sell, Larissa Taylor, and Asunción Lavrin. Nahua Confraternities in Early Colonial Mexico: The 1552 Nahuatl Ordinances of Fray Alonso de Molina, OFM. Berkeley: Academy of American Franciscan History, 2002.

Pellichi, Pedro María, and Ana A. Teruel. Misioneros del Chaco Occidental: Escritos de franciscanos del Chaco Salteño, 1861–1914. Jujuy: Centro de Estudios Indígenas y Coloniales, 1995.

Sahagún, Bernardino D., Thelma D. Sullivan, and H. B. Nicholson. Primeros memorials. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.

                                   Brian C. Belanger